Open Access Day 2008

Open Access is a growing international movement that encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society. Open-access journals and archives make research freely accessible online, without the traditional expensive subscription barriers that limit the reach of research.

The goal of Open Access Day is to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access within the international higher education community and the general public. The founding partners are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

Voices from Open Access Day

• The U’s own Greg Laden won the OA Day blog competition with A poem for Open Access Day.
• Short video interviews on why Open Access matters from teachers, funders, patient advocates, physician scientists, librarians and students.
• more videos on the way!

Did You Know?

• More than 300 University of Minnesota researchers have published their research in open-access journals since 2003.
• U researchers get a 10-15% discount when publishing in open-access journals from Public Library of Science (PLoS), BioMed Central, and Nucleic Acids Research, thanks to subscriptions by the U Libraries.
• The University of Minnesota Press has just released Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now by Gary Hall, a pioneer in open access publishing in the humanities.
• NIH-funded U researchers can get help from the U Libraries and SPA in meeting NIH’s open-access requirement.